We passed by Pittsburg and crossed the Alleghany Mountains, the former remaining in my memory as a nightmare of squalor, and the latter as a vision of beauty and delight. We travelled long days through districts of untouched forest over the often described “corduroy” roads. I was utterly disappointed by the forests; all that I saw of them appeared to me a miserable collection of lank, unwholesome-looking, woebegone stems, instead of Windsor Forest on a vastly increased scale, which was, I take it, what I expected. I remember, too, being much struck by the performance of the drivers of the stages over the corduroy roads aforesaid, and often over boggy tracts of half reclaimed forest amid the blackened stumps of burned trees. The things they proposed to themselves to accomplish, and did accomplish without coming to grief, other than shaking every tooth in the heads of their passengers, would have made an English coachman’s hair stand on end! To have seen them at their work over a decent bit of road would on the other hand have provoked the laughter and contempt of the same critics. Arms and legs seemed to take an equal part in the work; the whip was never idle, and the fatigue must have been excessive. I do not think that any man could have driven fifty miles at a stretch over those roads. Cincinnati was reached at last. The journey to me had been delightful in the highest degree, simply from the novelty of everything. As things were done at that time it was one of very great fatigue, but in those days I seemed to be incapable of fatigue. At all events it was all child’s play in comparison with my crossing the ocean in the good ship _Corinthian_. We found my mother and two sisters and my brother Henry well, and established in a roomy bright-looking house, built of wood, and all white with the exception of the green Venetian blinds. It stood in its own “grounds,” but these grounds consisted of a large field uncultivated save for a few potatoes in one corner of it; and the whole appearance of the place was made unkempt-looking--not squalid, because everything was too new and clean looking for that--by uncompleted essays towards the making of a road from the entrance-gate to the house, and by fragments of boarding and timber, which it had apparently been worth no one’s while to collect after the building of the house was completed. With all this there was an air of roominess and brightness which seemed to me very pleasant. The house was some five or ten minutes’ walk from what might be considered the commencement of the town, but it is no doubt by this time, if it still stands at all, more nearly in the centre of it. CHAPTER VIII.